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British and Japanese scientists win Nobel for stem cell research

A significant reason why the United States wasnâ€™t competitive in this research for years was the anti-science interference, handicaps introduced by the Bush Administration and the nutballs brought into political power by the Party-formerly-known-as-Republican.

My contempt never recedes for ideologues, pundits and prophets who assign values of good or bad to knowledge. They would thwart any research topic by assigning a value to study based on what they think may result.

Scientists from Britain and Japan shared a Nobel Prize today for the discovery that adult cells can be transformed back into embryo-like stem cells that may one day regrow tissue in damaged brains, hearts or other organs.

John Gurdon, 79, of the Gurdon Institute in Cambridge, Britain and Shinya Yamanaka, 50, of Kyoto University in Japan, discovered ways to create tissue that would act like embryonic cells, without the need to harvest embryos.

They share the $1.2 million Nobel Prize for Medicine, for work Gurdon began 50 years ago and Yamanaka capped with a 2006 experiment that transformed the field of â€śregenerative medicineâ€ť â€“ the field of curing disease by regrowing healthy tissueâ€¦

All of the bodyâ€™s tissue starts as stem cells, before developing into skin, blood, nerves, muscle and bone. The big hope for stem cells is that they can be used to replace damaged tissue in everything from spinal cord injuries to Parkinsonâ€™s disease.

Scientists once thought it was impossible to turn adult tissue back into stem cells, which meant that new stem cells could only be created by harvesting embryos â€“ a practice that raised ethical qualms in some countries and also means that implanted cells might be rejected by the body.

â€śWe would like to be able to find a way of obtaining spare heart or brain cells from skin or blood cells. The important point is that the replacement cells need to be from the same individual, to avoid problems of rejection and hence of the need for immunosuppressionâ€¦â€ť

The chairman of the awards committee, Urban Lendahl, told Reutersâ€¦â€śYou canâ€™t take out a large part of the heart or the brain or so to study this, but now you can take a cell from for example the skin of the patient, reprogram it, return it to a pluripotent state, and then grow it in a laboratory,â€ť he said.

â€śThe second thing is for further ahead. If you can grow different cell types from a cell from a human, you might â€“ in theory for now but in future hopefully â€“ be able to return cells where cells have been lost.â€ť

She did not regrow her breast, she had a tissue transplant to replace the tissue that was lost from the lumpectomy. That's two very different things. Basically, what they did with the stem cells was to use them as a bridge to keep the fat cells from dying off right away. Otherwise the fat cells would have just died off fairly quickly. There still is not any proof that you can turn an adult cell into the stem cell of your choice, which is what a lot of this research is about. Nor have they been able to cure any disease with stem cells, something else that the research is trying to do. Nor have they been able to use stem cells for anyone other than the person who donated them in the first time because of MHC markers.

Quoting Citygirlk:

There was this woman who lost her breast to canser and used the stem cells from the fat in her stomatch to regrow the breast that was lost.

"To have sex and have a baby would be a super simple decision, but not everybody can do it."

But using embryonic stem cells for research - as Dr Pera's
lab at the Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine
does - is controversial because the embryos are destroyed in order to
use them.

Dr Pera's lab uses embryos left over from IVF treatments.

Laboratory generation?

Stem cells have the potential to grow into any cell in the
body. Creating eggs in a lab could become mainstream, much like IVF is
viewed today.

Dr Pera says there are about one
million or 1.5 million embryos made each year in America using IVF -
and about 500,000 of those embryos are discarded. About 500 of those
embryos are used for research, she said.

"And people worry about those 500 instead of the 500,000 discarded," Dr Pera says.

The Japanese study marks the first time a mammal has been
created from stem cells. It is being hailed as the Holy Grail of
reproductive stem cell research.

The researchers at Kyoto University say they have
demonstrated how to grow eggs and sperm in a lab and combine them to
produce seemingly healthy offspring.

"We are reinvigorated again. It seems that something every
two years comes out that gets everyone reinvigorated," Dr Pera said of
the Japanese study.

"We've been mostly working on the human system to do the same things - to make mature eggs and mature sperm in a dish."

Pregnancy age limits

By creating sperm and eggs from embryonic stem cells, scientists hope to better understand the reproductive process and embryos.

Clinically, this could eventually give new options to infertile couples who want to have biological children.

Dr Pera's lab has successfully made "primitive" sperm and
eggs in the past, but have not yet mastered creating cells good enough
to actually use in human reproduction.

"The cells have some errors. When you think about stem cell
biology and regenerative medicine, most applications are about making
large batches or large sets of cells for, say, cardiac repair," she
says.

"Here, we are trying to make one cell that's perfect.

"One mistake in a genome can lead to devastating disease in a
child. And so I would guess if we were not so careful we could inject
the cells we make into an egg and see what happens.

"But you can do that in mice. You can't do that in women."

If successful, the technology could significantly wind back the time on a woman's biological clock.

That is great news for many women who have put off having
babies to pursue careers and for women who cannot get pregnant due to
cancer treatments.

But it raises a slew of new ethical issues: who would decide when a woman is too old to become pregnant?

"That is one of the major worries of technologies like this - what age should women be allowed to reproduce," Dr Pera says.

"In most countries there is an age limit - mainly based on
health of being able to carry a pregnancy. It can be dangerous to the
heart. It's hard to carry a baby."

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